I first met Rudi three years ago in the senior’s home he owns. He was tapping an old wooden keg in the basement. I was on an interim trip with the Calvin German department and Rudi was an old friend of my professor. When I first spoke with him, I told him I’d be spending the following semester in Europe, in Austria.

“Then you will have to come back to Bavaria,” he said.

Rudi is a Catholic priest. He looks like Bavaria, if Bavaria were a person. What I mean by that is this: if the self-proclaimed Free State of Bavaria—Germany’s southeastern region (Bayern, in German)—could pick a person, any person, to act as its mascot and all-purpose representative, it would be Rudi.

Bavaria is southern, proud, mostly Catholic, and laughed at by most of the rest Germany for its provincialism. To compare Bavaria to Texas would be too easy and still somehow a bit accurate.

Rudi has white hair, always combed back because he carries a comb with him everywhere. He has green, focused eyes that somehow always seem to be looking elsewhere. He is rotund in a way that assures you he has lived a happy life. The way his cheekbones sit low on his face tell me his happy life has been long, deliberate, and, at times, grievous. When he drinks beer—something he does often—he, with only his thumb, index, and sometimes middle fingers, raises his glass nimbly, tosses his head back, and quaffs violently before releasing a long and satisfied huff.

I last saw Rudi two months ago when I took two friends to Munich to visit him. We met at the Hofbräuhaus, where he says the American tourists go to meet the Chinese tourists. His hair was unkempt when he arrived.

“I biked here,” he said. “No one bikes in America, I heard.” This annoyed me. Then he sat down and combed his hair.

During our visit, he drove us to the nearby Bavarian town of Freising, a once influential city that lost its political sway during secularization in the early 1800s. While there, Rudi took us to the local cathedral, recalled its architectural history, and sang a Latin chant in the catacombs. On our way out of the towering iron doors, I reached into my pocket to find a euro I could donate. Rudi slapped my forearm.

“Respect the church. Keep your hands out of your pockets,” and he kept walking forward. This sounds much more intimidating in German.

We then made our way to the cemetery contiguous to the cathedral. A fellow priest and friend of Rudi’s had died some years ago, and Rudi had been unable to pay his respects until now. It took us a while to find the grave, but when we did, Rudi paused there for a moment and left without speaking.

Afterwards we drove to Brauerei Weihenstephan, which claims to be the oldest brewery in the world. Over wheat beers in the garden, Rudi told us how, when he was in school, he would come here with other would-be priests, attend mass at the cathedral, then come back to the beer garden. He talked about his work in the Congo, where he has established schools, churches, and businesses to empower a people still suffering from civil war and genocide.

What does it mean to be a citizen of a place? How does that look for the Christian, who, in claiming that title, subscribes to two citizenships, one that is lasting and one that is, as the hymn says, a “transient dream?”

People say that married couples begin to look like each other with age. Rudi is not wed to Bavaria; he’s given his life to more important things. But Bavaria, with its cathedrals, beer gardens, American visitors, and dead priests, reverberates with his person.

On the way home from the beer garden, I began to wonder if Rudi looks like Bavaria, or if it’s Bavaria that looks like him. How do I explain their shared Rudi? Rudi has dictated my entire experience of the region; it’s near impossible for me to imagine Munich, Freising, or even a wheat beer without eliciting memories of him. I doubt he would even know it; he always seems to be looking ahead.

This seems to be the task of the dual citizen: To fix a gaze onward and upward on a place not yet seen. Maybe once you do, everything around you will begin to resemble what you see.

Andrew Knot

Andrew Knot (’11) lives and writes in Cologne, Germany.